The Levels of Difficulty of Sports Betting
There are many ways to make money at sports betting, each with different required levels of skill.
Earlier this year, I read a piece where someone described the stock market as a series of puzzles of escalating difficulty to solve, with each progressive level of difficulty requiring higher degrees of skill and experience, but also the potential rewards of each level of puzzle to be higher as well. You can start out identifying basic patterns that signal inefficiencies and trade on those, but since most market participants can identify those patterns as well, the returns on those trades won’t be all that large. As you get better at the mechanics of trading and your knowledge base increases, you are in a position to expand your range of trades you can make, each requiring a higher level of some kind of skill (forecasting, evaluation, market timing, etc.) And at each successive level of trade you can make, while your margins may go down over time, the amount of volume at which you can make these trades goes up, resulting in an overall higher earnings potential.
This is an incredibly useful framework for sports betting as well. In my opinion, people jump into the deep end of sports betting way too early, absolutely sure they can handicap the hardest markets better than the books can, and get frustrated when their envisioned success doesn’t materialize. (Slightly less worse is when people jump into those markets for entertainment purposes only, but then decide to stay in those markets once they decide to start taking it more seriously.) In reality, they would be better off trying to establish and execute on more basic edges first and work their way up the ladder of difficulty of puzzles to solve in order to learn the fundamentals of identifying value along the way.
There’s no clear-cut definition of which puzzles/problems should be at the bottom versus the top of this ladder, but a good rule of thumb is the higher up the ladder you go, the more original handicapping you’ll need to do yourself. But there are still plenty of profitable puzzles to solve that require little to no original handicapping on your own, and learning how to solve those lower-level problems provides foundational experience to tackle the next-level ones on the ladder. If someone analytical-minded came up to me with zero sports betting experience but wanted to get good at it, here’s the order of problems I would recommend they get proficient at solving:
Level 1: Matched Betting/Arbitrage
This is a great introductory step, because it requires precisely zero underlying sports knowledge about the bets that drive these opportunities. Matched betting, or arbitrage, is where two prices on a bet at two different sportsbooks are divergent enough that you can place bets on both sides of the bet and make a guaranteed return. Granted, these returns are not very large; you’re usually making bets on the order of something like betting $240 to win $2, but it is a risk-free return and offers a safe and guaranteed path to making money. Services like BetsBooster offer step-by-step guides on how to utilize signup bonuses with these bets, resulting in a guaranteed low 4-figure return from deposit bonuses alone. Clearing these bonuses also requires you to have accounts at multiple sportsbooks to take advantage of every price offered, an essential and foundational step for achieving higher levels of success at sports betting. And getting comfortable with matched betting ingrains a level of price sensitivity at a very early point, which is a habit that most bettors don’t acquire if they enter sports betting through their usual entertainment-driven entry points. Realistically, your effective hourly rate if you stick to arbitrage betting alone probably be won’t be high enough to make it worth your while, but if you use it as a method to clear sportsbook deposit bonuses, it’s a great introductory step to get comfortable with the fundamentals.
Level 2: Exploiting Bad Prices, aka Top-Down Betting
One natural question people start to ask after getting comfortable betting arbitrage opportunities: why do sportsbooks have wildly divergent prices for bets sometimes? By definition, arbitrage can’t exist unless at least one of the books is “wrong” according to whatever the real fair price is for a bet. If you can start to think critically about how to determine which book is on the wrong side of an arbitrage opportunity, you can start betting into those wrong prices exclusively, taking on some risk but having a much higher rate of return over the long term.
One simple way to determine which book is wrong is to compare their price to the average price from other sportsbooks. Usually, one of the books sticks out like a sore thumb with a bad price, and making an educated guess that the outlier price from one of the books is the bad price is usually a profitable guess. Pay close attention to what we did here- once again, we made no effort to come up with an original guess on what the fair price should be from our own handicapping, we just compared one price to the rest of the market and guessed it’s probably bad. This is called top down betting, where you’re using other market prices to identify books that are offering bad prices. Our goal with top down betting is to figure out which bets are profitable only using data from other sportsbooks and no original handicapping of our own.
One common implementation of this strategy is to compare prices at all sportsbooks to prices offered by “sharp” sportsbooks, aka sportsbooks that have high limits on all their bets and dedicate significant resources to making their pricing as sharp as possible, and bet into non-sharp books whose price is significantly different from the sharp books. There are a number of sites, like OddsJam and Unabated, that help users do exactly this; Betscope users have used a similar strategy to use our tools in a top-down approach. (Also, stay tuned- we’ll have more tools to help you soon with exactly this shortly!) Not only is this a significantly more profitable approach than matched betting, but it still stays in the sweet spot of requiring zero sports handicapping knowledge to turn a profit. In my opinion, top-down betting is an underrated place to stay on the sports betting puzzle ladder: you can clear low-to-mid 5 figures with a moderate amount of time spent, and you don’t have to invest a lot of time into original handicapping.
So why doesn’t everyone do this if it’s such easy money? Because most people get into sports betting not because they want to make money, but because they either want to just have fun, or more crucially, they want to prove how clever they are. For many people, it’s just not fun or satisfying if you’re not using your own sports knowledge to come up with your own price and try to beat the market. And while that’s still an attainable goal at higher levels, most people probably think they’re ready to do exactly this, when they should have gotten more proficient at the basics of the lower level steps on the ladder we’ve been talking about. Before you start handicapping markets yourself, you should at least be confident that you can profit with top-down betting, a very achievable goal that again, requires zero sports handicapping knowledge. And if you don’t want to get into handicapping yourself but you’re cognizant that sportsbooks can and do hang bad prices and you want to exploit that fact, top-down betting is a great place to stay on the ladder to make money in sports betting.
Level 3: Handicapping Low-Limit Markets
One of the benefits of top-down betting is you really internalize how wide the prices are for so many betting markets across sportsbooks. Aren’t the books supposed to be the end-all be-all source of truth for predicting how the game is going to go? If that’s the case, then why do they have such different prices for the same markets? And when you inevitably get limited after becoming profitable in some of the lower limit markets, maybe you start to wonder what exactly the books are so afraid of in these markets, given that they have such low limits and they’re quick to restrict you if you have success with them. Slowly, but surely, you come to the conclusion that these markets are not in fact efficient, and you might in fact be able to come up with a better number than the books. You think you might be ready to start handicapping your own number and not just rely on bad prices to find profitable spots, but rely more on your own numbers to bet into the market.
How to get good at coming up with your own number is well beyond the scope of this article, as it’s a never ending process of refinement. Many bettors are successful blending one or more projection sources as their number and don’t make any themselves, knowing when and where to execute on those numbers. Others go deep into the modeling and originating process, getting good at the fundamentals of predictive analytics and come up with their own bettable numbers. All of these are viable options and are required if you want to advance to the next ladder of sports betting and open up your range of bettable opportunities. And if you try to go down this route, your best place to start will be lower limit markets. Typically, this means prop betting, alternate spreads/totals, and opening lines for regular spreads and totals markets. Low limit markets have low limits for a reason: they’re much more inefficient and beatable than mature markets, so sportsbooks will want to minimize their liability in these areas. If you’re ready to take the plunge and move away from top-down betting, proving your edge in these low-limit markets should be your first test.
Additionally, the skills you’ve built up from the previous steps on the ladder will help you juice your edge in these markets. Line shopping will be secondhand nature to you at this point, and you should have some intuition built up around which books are sharper or weaker in certain markets from your time betting into them via top-down betting. Betscope can be a tremendous help for this step: our distribution-based approach to line shopping ensures you’re always getting the best number; all you have to do is plug your numbers into our odds page and run our calculator to get the list of bets you should be making to utilize your numbers most effectively.
The advantage of moving up to this level is your expanded range of betting options. If you can beat low-limit markets without needing to bet into only weakly priced markets, you’ll be able to capitalize on more betting opportunities, increasing your betting volume and your overall returns. And getting the fundamentals of handicapping down is essential if you want to move up to the final stage of sports betting.
Level 4: Handicapping High-Limit Markets
This is the final step of sports betting mastery: being able to bet your original numbers into the highest limits allowed by sportsbooks. This means your numbers are sustainably better than the sportsbook’s numbers during all periods and not just during openers. It takes a lot of work to get numbers that are reliably better than the sportsbooks: you’ve priced in all of the major angles and variables, pored over your outliers to understand where your leaks are and have tamped them down, and know how to blend objective and subjective information into an informed bet/no-bet decision for every number on the board.
This refinement is a never ending process. The best handicappers I know never feel like their originating process is truly done, as there are constantly new data sources, modeling techniques, and changes in the fundamental conditions to account for. They also know their edges are constantly in flux, and many will go away over time as the sports betting markets advance toward further efficiency, requiring them to stay a step ahead and find new sources of edges as old ones dry up. And all of them share another crucial trait: an absolute love of the grind, and a high tolerance to put up with the minutiae and details of getting the best number possible.
This may all sound like a lot of unnecessary work to get to this point- maybe you’re already betting into these markets and have had some success, so you feel like you don’t need to go through the baby steps and learn the fundamentals. In the majority of cases, I would guess that any success from novice sports bettors in these markets is due to variance, and their long-term win rate is going to regress to the mean. Maybe this has happened to you already- you had a hot streak to start, but are frustrated that your initial success isn’t being replicated. If that’s the case, you’ll be set up for far more success going through the steps outlined in this ladder, as you will learn the fundamentals of successful sports betting along the way.
I’ll close this one with a reminder from the top of the article: you are not required to progress along the entire ladder to be a successful sports bettor. Ultimately, a successful sports bettor is simply one that makes money from sports betting; the amount you make depends on what your goals are and how much time and effort you are willing to put into it. Just like there are successful amateur poker players or traders who can turn a profit but don’t make it their full time job, there are also sports bettors who can make X amount of money with Y amount of time invested. Where your X and Y are depend entirely on you, but no matter what those values are, there’s room to make money at whatever level you choose to be.